What Personalized Medicine Humans Need and Way to It --also on the Practical Significance and Scientific Limitations of Precision Medicine

Abstract

The rise of precision medicine has opened up a broad space for the development of modern medicine and has also given practical significance to the concept of personalised medicine. Precision medicine is establishing a personalized disease classification system that differs from the traditional system. However, the research progress of precision medicine in recent years is far from satisfactory: There are few disease types that can be attributed to the abnormality of a single target; the effects of current'precision' medications are not ideal, and various side effects remain unavoidable. The methodology of precision medicine is still reductionist, and it would not solve the integration problem of clinical treatment but rather would increase the difficulty of integration. Therefore, the precision medicine approach is not a feasible way to build a personalised medicine system. Based on the analysis and demonstration of the scientific limitations of precision medicine and the consistency of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and complexity science methods, this paper draws on the concepts and methods of cybernetics and complexity science, and proposes a fresh set of ideas and methods for the development of personalised medicine. The conclusion is as follows: Along the path of precision medicine, ideal personalised medicine cannot be achieved; what people ultimately need is personalised medicine that can achieve holistic integration. On the basis of TCM with the characteristics of holistic integration and personalisation, and according to scientific norms and the principle of evidence, building a theoretical model and state description system grounded in empirical evidence is the best way to establish a personalised medicine system.

Keywords: disease classification; holistic medicine; personalised medicine; precision medicine; state medicine.

Figure 1

The basic structure of a control system and the general control process. The solid line with arrows in the figure represents the general information transmission route for the control system to realize control, and the dashed line with arrows represents the return route of feedback information from the controlled system.

Figure 2

A state space described by a three-dimensional rectangular coordinate system. Each state in the state space is represented by a set of 3 numbers, (Xi, Yi, Zi). The three solid lines in the figure are used to mark the three dimensions (X, Y, Z) of the three-dimensional space, and the three dotted lines are used to mark the state points (Xi, Yi, Zi) and the three dimensions (X, Y, Z) association.